


Tireless Roads (That Day We Drove Out to the Ocean)

by thegrumblingirl



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Courtly Love, Daud gets hired as Jessamine's bodyguard/driver/watcher, Euhorn is a mob boss, F/M, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, POV Daud (Dishonored), Pining, Unstated Feelings, only not at court, this burst out of me within six hours, this is the bodyguard au no-one asked for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:47:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26421346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegrumblingirl/pseuds/thegrumblingirl
Summary: “Why, because my father told you to?” It was obedience she chafed against, but not obedience of Daud’s rules, really. He was just the middleman.“Because it is my job to keep you safe,” he told her. He said it dispassionately — he wasn’t a caring man.Something about her seemed to settle, while something else put that sadness back into her eyes as they met him in the rearview mirror.“Of course,” she said softly. “You’re just doing your job.”
Relationships: Daud/Jessamine Kaldwin
Comments: 14
Kudos: 21





	Tireless Roads (That Day We Drove Out to the Ocean)

**Author's Note:**

> MY 40TH DISHONORED FIC LMAO
> 
> I was watching a murder show on Netflix that had something like this as a subplot and I was like, Wellity wellity wellity. And so, from 5-11pm, this was my life that Sunday night. Here it is!
> 
> Soundtrack: [I've Wanted You, by First Aid Kit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0OWjK5Nupw).

“I don’t like him,” the girl said, doing her best, as it were, to verbally stomp her foot. She looked uncomfortable with her own tantrum — and it may have been that moment, all on its own that had ever persuaded Daud to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Her father’s attorney, a fool and a patsy both, turned to him as if to say, ‘She doesn’t like him.’ As if that decided whether Daud would let anyone frogmarch him down a pier after being met with the princess’ disapproval. Her father, however, was watching Daud. Kept watching him. His steady hands, clasped in front of his body (when they’re hiring you, always let them see your hands, and never again thereafter), his impassive gaze. The scar on his cheek.

“You’ll have him, nonetheless,” the father decided.

The girl swallowed her anger, but her disappointment was palpable. As was the hurt in her eyes when her father dismissed her shortly, to leave them to talk business. The terms Daud set were brief, and readily agreed to. The list of conditions — for Daud’s own conduct as well as the girl’s — was rather longer.

“Get your house in order,” the attorney told Daud. “And be here at 5am tomorrow, sharp.”

Daud was dismissed, too, and when he left the mansion, he unerringly followed the prickling at the back of his neck up to a second-story window. She was watching him, now.

He wasn’t being fair: she wasn’t a girl anymore — she was 23. He’d called her a girl because she was sheltered, he thought, if she still needed a minder. And that was what he’d be, more than a driver or a protector. He was there as much to control her as to guard her (the word itself fraught with ambiguity), that was clear from her father’s orders. But the upbringing of the daughter of the biggest mob boss in Dunwall stopped being sheltered, after a certain point.

Daud had no illusions that Jessamine Kaldwin knew exactly who her father was. Knew it firsthand.

And now, he was her driver.

*

“My name is Daud,” he introduced himself to her the next day, formally. “Would you like to see my service record?”

She didn’t scoff at him, but he had a hunch it was a near thing. “Would you like to see mine?” she returned, all the while assembling textbooks, folders, and notebooks in a calm sort of haste.

Daud’s first job was to take her to school where, improbably, she was studying medicine at one of DU’s prestigious institutes — still called the Academy, two hundred years later, for just how damn expensive it was.

Someone like him should have stuck out like a sore thumb, but apparently it was _avant garde_ , these days, for Dunwall’s upper crust to send their children to the Academy and donate a new wing or two every year in return for better grades. That included, of course, the offspring of diplomats and criminals both — and most often, those were one and the same, anyhow. Daud had given up on making the distinction when taking a new contract.

All this to say that he wasn’t the only shadow on that campus. They might as well set up a daycare for bored former spec ops and the odd former hitman. Old dogs, the lot of them, and so was Daud — at almost forty. He wouldn’t be doing this kind of work for much longer. And then, it’d either be the scrap heap or a quiet town somewhere in Serkonos where no-one would think twice about him, until one day, some young scrapper came along trying to prove himself — or trying to learn. He wasn’t particularly looking forward to either one.

But right now, that wasn’t his concern. His charge, however, was.

His young, pretty... boss, for lack of a better word. Sure, her father paid him, but it wouldn’t be his orders Daud would be taking seriously; unless he had to. It was clear, though, that the Kaldwin heiress had no mind to be giving him orders. Not for want of being headstrong, mind. For the first week, she all but ignored him. During the second, she watched him.

It was during the third that she began antagonising him. Asking impertinent questions, sounding more like a petulant, spoilt brat than Daud believed she truly was. And then, deliberately disobeying the few direct rules he had laid out to her on his first day.

“Miss Kaldwin,” he said quietly once they were inside the car; which to anyone who knew him may as well have been barking her name in irritation. But he would not raise his voice to her — she wasn’t a rebellious recruit. She was a young woman trapped in a gilded cage, a loveless home.

“What did I do now?” she shot back, aiming falsely innocent and, to her credit, hitting the mark.

“You’re supposed to wait until I’ve checked the car for manipulation,” he nonetheless explained patiently. That meant: tracking devices, tags. Explosives.

“If you stopped insisting on fetching me from the lecture hall and waited here in the car instead, you wouldn’t have to bother every time,” she returned smartly.

“You know I can’t do that,” he said.

“Why, because my father told you to?” It was obedience she chafed against, but not obedience of Daud’s rules, really. He was just the middleman.

“Because it is my job to keep you safe,” he told her. He said it dispassionately — he wasn’t a caring man.

Something about her seemed to settle, while something else put that sadness back into her eyes as they met him in the rearview mirror.

“Of course,” she said softly. “You’re just doing your job.”

He frowned, but her attention turned from him to her phone ringing. She picked up, and Daud knew to tune out as she greeted her possibly only true friend, Delilah. Miss Copperspoon, as she’d introduced herself to him with a haughty look undercut by the mirth in her gaze at meeting another one of ‘Jessa’s suits,’ as she referred to her friend’s bodyguards, hailed from the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak. Her mother had worked for the Kaldwins many years ago, and even though she had left the household when Delilah was fifteen, the girls had kept in touch. Once inseparable, they could now rely on one another.

Daud hoped that the call might put Jessamine on a better track for the rest of the day. He put her words out of his mind, for now.

*

One truth more or less universally acknowledged — and that Daud did not become more aware of until two months into this job — was that Jessamine was meant to marry Custis Pendleton, of all flagrant degenerates. The match had been arranged by their families, for money, power, and territory. Custis, content to keep whoring around in spite of his impending marriage, seemed blissfully indifferent to the absurdity of the union. Jessamine, however, suffered silently.

When it dawned on Daud what her father had condemned her to, he had to carefully school his features into that blank mask expected of him. So he stood, unblinking, off to the side while plans and preparations for the big engagement party were being made. As was expected, he kept his eyes on the room — and on his charge. She held herself well, he noted. But she was unmistakably miserable. He couldn’t blame her for that.

When he accompanied her up to her rooms on the second floor, he wondered whether she’d say anything. With the door closed behind them, she turned.

“I don’t want to marry him,” she confessed, as much as she had need to admit it to him. She didn’t seem to be near tears — perhaps the time for that had passed, and she could no longer weep. Perhaps she forbade herself to be vulnerable.

For a moment, he did not know what to say. Why would she tell him? She despised his presence in her life. So, he settled for something simple, and true.

“I understand,” he said. Nothing more, nothing less. And he meant it.

The words seemed to find their target. Her shoulders dropped, and she bent her head a little. Had she hoped he would offer to kill him for her, he wondered. Would she want him to?

Would he do it?

*

With that brief exchange of words, their relationship gradually improved. Where Jessamine had, in the beginning, been vexed by his taciturn nature, she now appreciated it. She breathed easy, deeply, when he settled in the driver’s seat after a long day of labs and lectures, and sometimes she’d smile. He was quiet, which may make him a bad conversationalist, but it also meant he didn’t judge.

*

And nothing spoke of improved relations as much as breaking the carefully stipulated rules at the first opportunity.

In the time that Daud had worked for the Kaldwin household, Euhorn had never forbidden Jessamine from going anywhere directly or stipulated a curfew; but Daud would wager that she had ceased to ask for things she knew were out of bounds. Like any self-respecting rebellious child, she did those things without permission and under the cover of night.

The first time Daud caught her sneaking out, spurred into a late patrol of the grounds by some restless impulse that he later recognised as worry over how cagey she’d been all day, always casting him odd glances he’d thought they’d gotten past by now; she stopped like a deer in headlights. For a moment, they stared at each other, each silent, at an impasse.

“Daud,” she said, breaking that strange spell. Only, it set something else in him to rattling. It was the first time she’d ever said his name.

“Do you need me to drive you anywhere, Miss Kaldwin?” he asked, as if it were three in the afternoon and Jessamine just out for a stroll.

Visibly, she relaxed, albeit still regarding him as though waiting for the other shoe to drop — or for him to sound the alarm.

“No, thank you. I’ll be fine.”

He looked around quickly, making sure that none of her father’s guards were patrolling off schedule, like he was. Then, he nodded, giving her a clear-cut look.

“You have my number,” he said. “If that changes.” _If there’s any trouble and you need rescuing._ Like a damsel in distress, he mocked himself.

She nodded, biting her lip. Perhaps, not to tell him where she was going, or with whom. (He could guess: Delilah. The only one in the world with balls enough to spit Euhorn Kaldwin in the face and tell him he needed to let his kid have some _fun_.)

“Do me a favour,” Daud surprised himself by adding, “text me when you get back? Just in case you need an alibi.” What kind of alibi that might be, he didn’t stop to think, but neither did Jessamine, it seemed, when she nodded again.

“Sure. Thanks.”

He waved her off. “Get out of here.” He turned, so did she, and neither looked back as they went their separate ways.

He received a simple, “Back at the house,” at 2:30. He studied the message for a few seconds, then he deleted the conversation. As he hoped she would, too, when the ticks turned blue.

The next time, he didn’t go out to catch her, though somehow he knew he’d get another text, in the small hours of the morning.

*

It was the night of the engagement party, and Daud watched, hovered, as Jessamine did her best to drown her sorrows — literally. She graduated from celebratory champagne for the announcement to gin, and from there to whiskey far too quickly to build up any kind of stamina. She smiled, fake and far too wide, and giggled at jokes that weren’t funny from men, her father’s friends, who saw little more in her than a trophy on another man’s mantle. One they were forbidden from touching but had no compunction leering at. Like lechers.

When it was clear that Jessamine was close to reaching her absolute limit and Euhorn and the Pendletons’ patience was running out, Daud intercepted her during a trip to the bar and — said nothing. He simply gave her a look. Right in front of him, she lost her false, saccharine smile. She looked so tired, instead.

“Upstairs?” he asked. She nodded.

He guided her, with his hand just hovering at her back in case she overbalanced and fell on the stairs, half glad that he didn’t have to carry her to bed, especially in full view of the entire party. Once they were in her quarters, though, she lurched forward.

“Oh no,” she managed through gritted teeth, then clamped her hand over her mouth.

“Oh no,” Daud echoed, took her arm and practically hauled her to the bathroom.

By some miracle, they managed without her breaking her ankles in those heels, Daud already regretting he hadn’t taken them off her when they came in, and then he resigned himself to holding her hair as she lost what little she’d eaten over the toilet. Her knees slipped on the rug, so he bent down further and slid his arm across her front for her to lean on him. She did, with what could be interpreted as a grateful sigh.

He gave her a minute to catch her breath.

“Can you get up?” he asked, mostly into her hair. It smelled like coconut.

“I think so.”

“Come on, then,” he rumbled, and slowly they righted her. Once standing, she listed to the side and into Daud, and he took her weight as he reached out to, ah, dispose of the evidence of her indiscretion.

“I’m so embarrassed,” she moaned, only slurring her words a little, and Daud managed a single huff of laughter, muted for her benefit.

“Med students have been known to get up to far worse in these parts,” he said drily, then slowly began herding her out of the bathroom. “First, you need to lose the shoes.”

They didn’t talk much more while he helped her find her face and apologise to it, then gave her some privacy while she changed into her nightclothes. He went back into her bedroom when she softly, sadly called for him.

She was nearly disappearing into a stack of pillows and blankets, but he could see her hair fanning out around her head. He went to her side and deposited a glass of water and a tub of elixir tabs next to her on the nightstand.

“Will you be alright?” he asked, and deliberately only meant tonight.

“Yeah,” she muttered. He was going to turn to leave when she added, “Daud? Will you stay, just a bit? Until I’ve fallen asleep?”

Daud fought with himself. She turned her head, looked up at him blearily from beneath a messy curtain of her hair, and it wasn’t a contradiction of her usual poise and competence. Not to him.

“Please?”

He thought of the people downstairs, who none of them cared that she was top of all of her classes, and that her father didn’t have to pay for renovations to swing that. That she was strong and kind, despite it all, and one of the most self-assured people Daud had ever met. But she was also, still, so alone. None of them cared that she was up here, on her own and miserable, and none of them would come to check on her. Least of all her father — or her damned fiancé.

“I’ll stay,” he said and pulled over a chair, to sit by the edge of the bed.

“Thank you,” she said, then yawned unattractively. It nearly made him smile.

For a while, he just sat and watched as she drifted off, counting down until he could safely go and leave her be, but she surprised him once again.

“My mother used to call me Jessie,” she murmured into her pillow. “Did you know that?”

“I did not know that,” Daud answered. In fact, he knew very little of her mother. She was never talked about.

“She died having my sister,” Jessamine continued. She sniffed, then said, “And I have no sister, either.”

“I’m sorry,” Daud said. And he was.

“No-one is allowed to call me Jessie anymore. Not even Delilah does, after I forbade her at the funeral.” Her voice was heavy with tears how, but they remained unshed. Out of nowhere, she murmured, “You could call me Jessie, you know.”

Daud opened his mouth, then shut it immediately. He didn’t want to tell her that, no, he couldn’t. Not now while she seemed so lost. Besides, she’d forget it by morning. When he looked back at her, she was fast asleep.

He watched over her for most of the night.

*

His certainty that she would forget that moment of vulnerability held for about a fortnight.

She was quiet, the morning after that disastrous party, and endured her father’s disappointment and lectures with stoicism. She and Daud had settled into a quiet sort of routine of him checking in with her at odd points of the day — after breakfast, between classes — to gauge her state of mind. He had that tingling at the tips of his fingers. He got that whenever a situation was about to go bad. And with Jessamine, something had to give.

At week three, he found her at lunch, distracted, staring into nothing.

“Miss Kaldwin,” he tried, mainly because sometimes it got a smile out of her. Nothing. “Jessamine,” he called, a little louder.

She startled, and her gaze skittered across nothing for a moment before landing on him.

“Sorry,” she said. “I was elsewhere.”

“It’s alright,” he said dutifully. “Just wanted to let you know your father called. He won’t be home for dinner.”

Usually, that was good, or at least tolerable news. Today, it seemed nothing could cheer her. She merely nodded. Daud took his customary place by the door. She let him be for about a minute.

“Won’t you sit with me?” she asked.

He shouldn’t.

He looked at her eyes.

He went.

Daud sat across from her, but at an angle. Still a shield, still all the exits in view. He spent most of that time watching her push her food around her plate. He waited.

“You never… you never did call me Jessie,” she said, shattering his illusion of having gotten away with it.

He looked up at her. Her gaze was searching.

“I can’t call you that,” he said gently. Too gently for what he was.

“Why not?”

He cast about for the words a moment. Then, he settled on, “Do you remember when I said I’d be OK playing by all your rules as long as you played by some of mine?”

“Like, when someone comes at me with a gun, I do what you say and don’t ask why?” she returned.

He only nodded, carefully.

She understood. “And this is another one of your rules.”

“It is.”

_I’m breaking far too many of them for you already._

*

And so, they continued dancing on the edge of that volcano.

When Jessamine’s fencing instructor had to cancel a session at the last minute, Daud stepped in, resuscitating an old talent. By the end of it, Jessamine was loose-limbed and laughing at his gruff commands to keep her guard up. He suspected he was smiling, too.

She asked him to teach her some hand to hand combat, after that.

“So I can defend myself,” she cast the line.

He didn’t bite. He knew what was good for him, and rolling around a training mat with Euhorn Kaldwin’s daughter was not it.

Not when she looked at him like _that_ when she thought he wasn’t paying attention.

He always paid attention.

One day, a couple weeks later, Euhorn had to unexpectedly leave the city — trouble with a supplier that, apparently, he didn’t trust his chief enforcer, Teague Martin, with. Or perhaps it was a show of force that was needed — Daud didn’t pretend to be interested in the politics of organised crime.

A few of Jessamine’s classes had been cancelled due to a conference, and so they found themselves at loose ends, of a sort. For Daud, protocol was clear and direct: drive her right back home. Her father did not like it when she went into the city proper without letting him know first. Daud turned to her, standing at the edge of campus, hands on his hips. His suit jacket was unbuttoned, but he was careful not to flash anyone the gun in his shoulder holster.

“Can I drive you anywhere, Miss Kaldwin?” he asked, fully intending the question to sound familiar and teasing, and she gifted him a grin in return. Then, her expression turned wistful.

“Could we go down to the river, do you think?”

He shrugged. She’d never mentioned it before, though her manner suggested it held some significance for her that Daud could not fathom.

“I don’t see why not,” he said, reaching into his pocket for the car keys. “Anywhere in particular?”

“Just the river,” she said, shaking her head. “Anywhere. Perhaps not too crowded,” she added; one minuscule concession.

“We’ll find a spot,” he said, and they started towards the car. She let him do his job, now.

The drive down to the Wrenhaven’s rocky shores was quiet, but Jessamine seemed at ease. Daud found an area that wasn’t frequented by many visitors, generally, and accompanied her down to the boardwalk. Once there, he gave her a little room; keeping an eye on her but giving her some semblance of privacy. Once or twice, she seemed to want to turn as if to talk to him, but she never quite did. Eventually, she stopped and looked out over the water. Daud took up a post a few paces back. He watched her, and watched as some of her melancholy drifted down the beach with the wind.

He knew then that he was not ready for what she could do to him. But he wasn’t ready to leave, either. Couldn’t leave her alone in this.

*

It happened about a month before the anniversary of her mother’s death. Daud had been dreading the date coming closer, if just for the ennui he could sense creeping in already. Euhorn was more absent than ever, which Daud thought suggested something, but kept it to himself. If Jessamine wanted his opinion, she would ask for it. Space to grieve was what she needed, he thought.

Until one day, Custis _fucking_ Pendleton came to the house and announced that, while her father was travelling ‘on business,’ he would set up at the mansion and ‘keep an eye on her.’

As soon as he was gone, Jessamine stormed up the stairs and even Daud had trouble following.

Once in her room, she began pacing. Then, she took a vase, filled with roses, and flung it at the floor-length mirror on the far wall. It shattered in a hail of glass and shards. Daud knew that the next thing tearing out of her would be the scream of a trapped, wounded animal. She’d have the whole house down on her head. On his, too. So he stepped up, hoping that the next piece of glass decor wouldn’t come aimed at his head, and reached for her hands.

“No,” she said, surprisingly quietly.

She turned away from him, he followed. Reached for her again, catching her wrists this time. He held them lightly — to calm, not to trap.

“Jessamine,” he murmured, but what he’d hoped would settle her only set her off.

“No!” she cried, angry and hurt, and tore herself from his grasp. But instead of fleeing, she pushed against his chest, paradoxically following to do it again. “NO!”

Desperate to quiet her lest someone came in and thoroughly misread the situation, he shushed her. She pushed against him harder, now beating her fists against his chest in a broken rhythm. It did not hurt past the vest he wore under his shirt at all times, but he felt it nonetheless.

“Jessamine,” he tried again, but she shook her head, and shoved him again.

She looked as lost as he’d only seen her once. He took a deep breath.

“Please. Jessie.”

And that did it. For the first time, she let her tears escape. And then, she rushed forward, towards him, and without thinking he let her turn into his chest, and put his arms around her before he could convince himself not to.

She sobbed into his shirt.

“Talk to me,” he rumbled.

“I don’t want this life anymore,” she said, her breath hitching. “I don’t want to live in a house bought with blood money. I know what my father is, I know what he does. And I know I’m never going to be more than the wife of the man he names as his successor if I stay.” She gasped for air, the words tumbling out of her in a rush. “I just want _out_.”

“What do you want me to do?” he asked the question he so pointedly had not months before.

“Find a way,” she said, turning her head so her forehead rested against his sternum. He was embarrassingly aware of where her hands were resting on his shoulder and chest. “Find a way… for us both.”

He looked down to peer at her face, which meant he had to lean back a little. She raised her head, returning his gaze.

“If I do, it will be a path we’ll have to take together,” he said lowly.

She nodded, and one of her hands reached up to cup his jaw.

“I trust you,” she said, just as quietly.

When he kissed her, he remembered that love was a knife that slipped between your ribs unseen. You never knew until it was too late.

**Author's Note:**

> I basically wrote courtly romance in the one setting that's least like court. I love it.


End file.
